After more than a month of ongoing demonstrations and police crackdowns, the Iran protests are turning into a full-scale uprising.
How Iran’s protests transformed into a national uprising | CNN - Jomana Karadsheh, Tamara Qiblawi & Adam Pourahmadi:
October 13, 2022 - "Nearly a month after the start of nationwide protests, parts of Iran now bear the hallmarks of battle zones, with flares lighting up skies, gunfire ringing out and bloody scenes recorded in ... [Sanandaj] the Kurdish-majority city in western Iran, where some of the most dramatic images have emerged from the protests, despite a near total internet shutdown in the area.... Video apparently shot from rooftops showed what appeared to be clashes between young protesters and heavily armed security forces. Bullets and flares crossed the night sky and a cloud of dust and smoke covered the city blocks. At street level, other videos showed protesters throwing rocks at police, with the officers sometimes traveling in a procession of motorcycles, who appeared to be shooting at the crowd.
"Large numbers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have been participating in the crackdown in addition to local police, say activists in Sanandaj, who accuse authorities of lashing back indiscriminately. According to Oslo-based Kurdish rights group Hengaw, a 7-year-old boy died in his mother’s arms on Sunday after security forces fired into a crowd of protesters. While it is impossible to independently verify a death toll from such clashes, gruesome images circulating online, and eyewitness testimony collected by CNN as well as rights groups, point to the bloodshed.
"Video showed a driver in the city lying dead with a large gunshot wound in his face – activists said he was honking his horn in solidarity with protesters. 'In Sanandaj, they shoot the people honking their horns with bullets. And they shoot young and old alike,' said another protester in a video message to CNN. 'The injured don’t go to hospitals because if they go there plain-clothes police will arrest them'.... 'We are protesting for freedom in Iran. For the prisoners and the condemned, for the people of Iran calling for the regime to go. Everyone wants this regime to go.'
"Despite the government’s repeated claims of having restored calm, the scenes are being replicated throughout the country to varying degrees, with the Kurdish-majority west of the country appearing to bear the brunt of the crackdown.... Iranian people keep pouring into thoroughfares across the country.... Increasingly, activists and experts are characterizing the protests as a national uprising and one of the biggest challenges to the Iranian regime since its founding.
"'This is not a protest for reform,' Roham Alvandi, an associate professor of History at the London School of Economics, told CNN. 'This is an uprising demanding the end of the Islamic Republic. And that is something completely different to what we’ve seen before.'
"In the last month, Iran’s protesters have targeted the economic and political nerve centers of the regime. Videos showed people throwing rocks at police in the center of Tehran. In the capital’s bazaar, security forces were seen running away from demonstrators. Even in the conservative cities of Mashhad and Qom – the heart of the regime’s powerbase – demonstrators crop up frequently. Some gas and oil refineries have also turned into sites of protests, which are rapidly spreading in the country’s southwest.
"The country’s Council of Oil Contractor Workers has said it would potentially call a strike and pause oil production. The petroleum industry is the lifeline of Iran’s economy, which has been buckling under the strain of US sanctions unleashed by the Trump administration in 2018.... Video suggested that the demonstrations at the refineries began as protests over wages, but then transformed into anti-regime protests, with laborers chanting 'death to the dictator' – a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"Around the country, protesters have pushing for economic strikes with some success. In Kurdish-majority areas, where the protests are believed to be more organized than elsewhere in the country, social media videos showed lines of shops shuttered. In Tehran’s bazaar, a number of stores have closed in recent days, though many merchants say they did so to protect their shops from the protests and the crackdowns that follow. A general strike, which Iranian activists have called for, has yet to materialize."
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/middleeast/iran-protests-national-uprising-cmd-intl/index.html
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